I am confused about the current requirements to get hardware accelerated flash content.

I often heard complaints that my Flash games would not run as smoothly under some circumstances, especially on OSX Lion (I used wmode=direct for a smooth scrolling).

While I was trying to get around this I upgraded to Flash Player 11 on my Alienware m11x and suddenly lost hardware acceleration for my Intel GMA 4500HD which is part of the integrated hybrid graphics. When I switch over to GeForce everything is fine.

Now to use Flash without reduced battery life I have to revert back to Flash Player 10.3.

Then I learned about the official Stage3D blacklist/requirements and noticed that my chipset is supported but the driver version is not. It's a few versions older (8.15.10.1994) than the supported version and probably won't get updated since it's part of Dell's hybrid driver.

So are the Stage3D requirements also the requirements to get any hardware acceleration in Flash now?

Thank you very much for your honest answer. I already knew that tech note, but I think it is misleading and suggests that you only need those requirements for Stage3D content.

Also, I have to note that I am deeply worried by this decission. All Linux, probably many notebook/netbook and shuttle pc users are now either stuck with flash player 10 or just update and wonder why their Youtube playback suddenly looks and performs worse, especially since so many people are biased against the Flash Player these days.

Sure, it's a good idea to keep your drivers up to date, but I don't see why my GMA driver is blacklisted just because of it's version number and I absolutely have no control to even override it on my own risk (despite the fact that everything works fine with flash player 10.3). Sadly some mobile chipsets like mine have special driver sets and cannot use the official drivers.

So as a flash developer I am concerned that it just unnecessarily limits the the appeal to the mainstream audience, since most of my clients are not really into 3D game browser expierences.

I have an Intel G41 Express chipset with the latest graphics drivers, and I get a lot of frame dropping with the latest Flash 11 update (11.1.102.55), even with lower quality videos. This is something that should be fixed.